Fueling baseball’s power surge

Fred Klein, who wrote
about sports for the Wall Street Journal for nearly 25 years, this week
joins our lineup of the finest sports business writers and reporters. Klein
will aim his column, “Between the Lines,” at issues and insights important
or interesting to decision-makers in the industry. His column will appear
in this space weekly.

The line
about watching what you wish for, because you might get it, seems apt
as baseball's regular season draws to a close. The game's prayer for
another interest-revving Home Run Derby, a la the 1998 duel between
Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, has been answered, with three National
Leaguers — Sosa, Barry Bonds and Luis Gonzalez — having
topped the once lofty level of 50.

But along with the oohs and aahs, the homer race to top McGwire's munumental
mark of 70 has stirred a question that becomes more nagging with each
long-ball blast. Given Major League Baseball's don't ask-don't tell
stance on steroids, those potent but sinister performance-enhancers,
the suspicion has grown that more than good wood is behind the power
surge.

Yes, baseball has a policy that prohibits the use of illegal substances,
but it tests only players who've run afoul of the law over the use of
such "recreational" drugs as cocaine, marijuana and PCP, and limits
its inquiries to those things. None of them affect athletic performance,
so it's a PR exercise.

By contrast, the NFL, NBA, NCAA and the Olympic sports all specifically
ban and test for steroids. If their efforts are in some ways perfunctory,
they at least evince a seriousness about the subject.

The notion that steroids have infiltrated baseball has gained credence
as more players step to the plate, or mound, sporting button-popping
physiques. The issue made news in 1998 when the Bluto-muscled McGwire
admitted to having taken androstenedione, a steroid-based dietary supplement
that had slipped through the U.S. controlled-substance net. It surfaced
again last year when Boston police found injectable steroids and syringes
in a car belonging to Manny Alexander, then a Boston Red Sox infielder.

Baseball people used to whisper about steroid use in their game, but
some now say it aloud. Kevin Towers, the San Diego Padres' general manager,
has repeatedly voiced concerns on grounds of competitive fairness and
health, the latter because the drugs have been linked to heart and kidney
damage, among other ills. In a spring training interview, Mark Grace,
the veteran first baseman of the Arizona Diamondbacks, estimated that
at least one-third of all major leaguers take steroids in some form.
Grace, an old-fashioned type whose batting average bulges more than
his biceps, said he didn't use them "because I'd like to have a life
after baseball."

Of the current Home Run Derby contestants, the Chicago Cubs' Sosa raises
the fewest eyebrows. He's a certified power guy whose 66 homers chased
McGwire into the last week of the '98 campaign. Sosa's a thoroughly
new-style baseballer who'd be convincing as an NFL linebacker.

The San Francisco Giants' Bonds' drive toward 70 home runs is more
surprising because he'd averaged just 33 a year over his previous 15
seasons and 40 a year over the previous five. Once a built-for-speed
model who stole 52 bases in one season, he's noticeably bigger through
the arms and shoulders than he used to be.

The presence of the Diamondbacks' Gonzalez in the top three is downright
astonishing. He'd topped 30 home runs in just one of his previous 10
campaigns, yet this year, at a taut 6-foot-2 and 195 pounds, he's not
only kept pace with the big boys, he also beat them in the home-run
contest at the All-Star Game.

Gonzalez is a thoroughly nice man, so writers hesitate to ask him if
he owes his new-found punch in part to chemistry. But they do, and,
like Sosa and Bonds, he answers no, he's simply working harder and smarter
than before. The other day, he was in a print ad for the GNC nutritional-aids
chain, posing with a can of a dietary supplement whose main ingredient
of whey has wholesome, nursery-rhyme connotations.

But go into a GNC store and you'll find andro-based products in the
same section as the one Gonzalez endorsed, available to anyone with
the requisite cash. You'd like to believe Gonzo, but baseball's head-in-the-sand
posture on steroids makes everyone a suspect, and saying it isn't so
isn't enough.